Sean Den­nehy and Don Burke, both CIA intel­li­gence ana­lysts, openly dis­cussed the work they are doing (with­out giv­ing away the detail, obvi­ously) on Intel­li­pedia. Sean was a great, enthu­si­as­tic pre­sen­ter, who was def­i­nitely a great choice for the con­fer­ence — a great walk­ing ad for the intel community.

Built as a mul­ti­lay­ered col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­form, Intel­li­pedia con­sists of sev­eral tools and lay­ers, from Unclas­si­fied that can be accessed via dial-​​in (and pre­sum­ably VPN) through to the Top Secret JWICS. They have a num­ber of tools, includ­ing inter­nal blogs, Tag­Con­nect (a del​.icio​.us equiv­a­lent) and video (the “CIA’s YouTube”).

Shared across the US Intel­li­gence Com­mu­nity, Intel­li­pedia and it’s sib­lings are, unlike Wikipedia, all 100 per cent attrib­ut­able in their con­tent — every cre­ation and every edit is directly attrib­ut­able. This approach was rec­om­mended for any enter­prise; an idea that I con­sider to have con­sid­er­able weight.

While Intel­li­pedia is run on the same Medi­aWiki plat­form as Wikipedia, Sean made it abun­dantly clear that it was less an ency­clo­pe­dia and more of a loca­tion for open dis­cus­sion of intel­li­gence top­ics. They are mas­sively bought into the real value of col­lab­o­ra­tive tools inside the wall and have a num­ber of tenets that assist their abil­ity to get their mes­sage out.

There is a strong push to really adopt usage across the ana­lyst com­mu­nity, not so much man­dat­ing use, but mak­ing non-​​use difficult.

Mate­r­ial is organ­ised top­i­cally not organ­i­sa­tion­ally as you would if you were Google search­ing. If an arti­cle exists on the Unclas­si­fied Intel­li­pedia, and higher clas­si­fied mate­r­ial exists, links to title-​​matched pieces are in the Unclas­si­fied arti­cle. Don spoke of the idea of “teach­ing search and teach­ing peo­ple” to find things. Smart.

The com­mu­nity work hard to replace exist­ing busi­ness processes; encour­ag­ing use of Intel­li­pedia as a plat­form instead of organ­is­ing, aggre­gat­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing else­where in a chan­nel–based medium, such as in email. Andrew McAfee’s SLATES was men­tioned by Sean as a foun­da­tion for this approach.

Blow­ing apart the “these are for young peo­ple” argu­ment, Don made it very plain that this is not a gen­er­a­tional issue. Intellipedia’s top con­trib­u­tor is a 61-​​year-​​old ana­lyst with 40 years of intel­li­gence com­mu­nity expe­ri­ence. New­com­ers of any age are men­tored into use by expe­ri­enced users (what a great idea!). There has been a mas­sive shift inside the CIA. As an exam­ple, there is mas­sively reduced use of Pow­er­Point as peo­ple pro­duce pages usable as a pre­sen­ta­tion on the Intel­li­pedia plat­form! Indeed, Don and Sean’s pre­sen­ta­tion was an Unclas­si­fied Intel­li­pedia page.